Fugue

Roderick Harris

07.Mar.08 - 06.Apr.08
Wed-Sun 12-6pm or by appt

Private View, 06.Mar.08, 6.30 - 8.30 pm

David Risley Gallery
45 Vyner St
London E2 9DQ
020 8980 2202
info@davidrisleygallery.com
www.davidrisleygallery.com
Tube Bethnal Green; BR Cambridge Heath, Hackney / Bethnal Green

David Risley Gallery is proud to present a new body of work by Roderick Harris. David Risley’s first independently organised exhibition at Zwemmer Gallery, London ‘Showdown’ was a solo show of work made by Harris following his graduation from the Royal College of Art in 2000. Fugue will be Harris’ first solo show for 4 years.

Over the past year Harris has been photographing and re-working footage of Michael Jackson performing “Smooth Criminal” from his “Dangerous” World Tour of 1993. Shooting directly from the screens surface, anomalous digital effects are created and a foggy, electronic texture resembling vintage or “psychic” photography emerges as a digital ghost of a ghost - further liquefied through painterly interpretation.

The collective title for this body of work “Fugue” derives from the Latin fuga – related to fugere (to flee). In music it denotes a type of contrapuntal composition most highly developed during the Baroque. In psychology it denotes a dreamlike altered state of consciousness that is dissociative – characterised by flight from personal identity as a response to trauma or stress.

Harris identified this performance as an effective lens through which an ongoing fascination with a network of psychological, esoteric, existential, pictorial and painterly connections converging around the notion of fugue could be explored. The stage performance is read as a highly orchestrated ritualisation of a surrogate persona analogous to the logic of personal fugue - as the notion of fugue itself is read as analogous to a wider, collective situation. Experience of fugue state typically expressed as that of the “puppet zombie” holds an uncanny relevance in light of the logic of Jackson’s earlier “Thriller”.

Pyrotechnics, spotlights, dry-ice and shadows, feature as centrally as performers but distanced from their original identity and context invite readings less than theatrical or banal. A hallucinatory transmutation bordering on the hyper-religious emerges, its participants caught up in a performance of uncertain currency.

The star of this spectacle fails to appear as icon to be worshipped or object of lampoon, but as an obscured and elusive fragment, a microcosmic creature (and audience) in dissociative flight playing out a game of losing itself on stage as within the materiality of a dissolved miniature painterly adventure.